The vulgarity is camouflaging the lack of humanity

In current affairs programs, news coverage of disasters no longer has anything to do with informing the public. Its purpose is the systematic exploitation of the suffering of people in extremely vulnerable situations. We saw another example of this on Tuesday in Just the right time Joaquín Prat Jr.'s interview on Telecinco with the uncle of a six-year-old girl who had lost her parents and twelve-year-old brother in the Adamuz train crash revealed that he only wanted to exploit the poor man's distress. They even used him to create suspense during commercial breaks and then rubbed his family's tragedy in with sensationalist, slapstick, and saccharine tactics.

Joaquín Prat, speaking very slowly and softly to dramatize his supposed sensitivity, said to the interviewee:Thank you for sharing whatever you'd like with us."What he said didn't matter to him. They just wanted to display him like a hunting trophy because of the gravity of his story. After reminding him that he had lost his sister, brother-in-law, and 12-year-old nephew, and that the little girl had been left destitute, he said to him:"TV breaks sometimes come at the most inconvenient times, but I'm going to ask you for a little patience so we can talk calmly later about what you're going through.When they returned from the commercials, they forced the man to watch a video with tragic music detailing all the misfortunes. Phrases likeThat girl had seen her father, her mother, and her brother die."They added the cries of some of her neighbors from her town lamenting the tragedy. They made her listen to the statements of a Civil Guard officer explaining the girl's struggle to get off the train on her own and how the child cried out for her parents. The video was even more disturbing, with a morbid tone:"But the family she was asking about wasn't there. They were inside those braids, now tons of iron.The interviewee endured listening to the story through the earmuff.My God..."," he murmured, dismayed by what he was feeling. Joaquín Prat asked him to explain what he was experiencing and to specify the difficulties they had encountered in identifying his relatives. The presenter emphasized the saddest situations. Then, they told him they had made a mistake.Stay strong. I hope they got it from somewhere."Joaquín Prat dismissed him. You have to be a bad person to exploit victims, ask them to be patient with the publicity, treat them condescendingly, and subject them to the details of their misfortune. Inhumanity, disguised as common sense and sentimentality, is an act of cruelty."